From an excerpt of Dagmar Herzog’s Sex in Crisis:
Evangelical sexual conservatives took up some of the main concerns of the feminist women’s movement of the 1970s-1980s. An interest in intensifying women’s sexual pleasure has been a central focus of evangelical sex advice from the start. Many women’s frustration at male fascination with pornography and emotional non-presence during sex — another feminist theme — and the need to help men get comfortable with physical and emotional mutuality, have also been taken up. So too have the classic women’s movement themes of concern about domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation of women.
In the wake of the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973, and in response to the growing public visibility of gays and lesbians in the 1970s and 1980s and their demands for an end to discrimination, evangelical conservatives could count on these two issues, along with more general calls for restrictions on sex education and the restoration of “traditional family values,” as their major fundraising and mobilizing tools. All through the 1990s, playing to homophobic reflexes was one of the Christian Right’s most popular tactics. But nothing has been more successful in the early twenty-first century than its ability to hijack the national conversation about heterosexuality.
Read the rest of the excerpt at Alternet.org.